1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid discharging device, such as an ink jet printer, and a method of controlling the same, and more particularly to a liquid discharging device equipped with a liquid discharging head which discharges liquid from nozzle orifices by being driven by a discharge driver using a drive pulse and a method of controlling the liquid discharging device.
2. Related Art
For example, the liquid discharging device is equipped with a liquid discharging head which can discharge liquid and is a device for discharging various kinds of liquid from the liquid discharging head. A representative liquid discharging devices is an image recording device, such as an ink jet printer (hereinafter, referred to just as a printer), which is equipped with, for example, an ink jet recording head (hereinafter, referred to just as a recording head) serving as a liquid discharging head and records images by discharging ink in a liquid state from nozzle orifices of the recording head by driving a discharge driver of the recording head by a drive pulse toward a recording medium (discharge target) such as recording paper and hitting the recording medium with the ink. In recent years the liquid discharging device has been applied to various kinds of manufacturing devices such as a color filter manufacturing device, for example, of a liquid crystal display unit as well as the image recording device.
In the printer, if the temperature of ink varies according to the change of an ambient temperature (a temperature around a printer (an inside portion), and particularly the temperature at a region near a nozzle orifice), viscosity of the ink varies too. As a result, even if the drive pulse having the same waveform is used, the discharging behavior of the ink discharged from the nozzle orifice, for example, timing and speed of discharging, varies, so the image is not correctly printed on the recording medium. For such a reason, a technique of correcting the drive pulse according to the change of the ambient temperature is suggested. For example, JP-A-2001-096733 discloses a technique in which the temperature around a recording head (ambient temperature) is assumed as the temperature of ink and ink discharge timing is adjusted by correcting the drive pulse on the basis of the ambient temperature in order that misalignment between the actual hitting position of ink and the hitting target position of ink does not occur.
However, the above technique is not desirable because it needs to additionally use a temperature measuring unit to acquire the ink temperature information.